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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Public colleges (U of MI, U of WI, UMD, Pitt, that I know of) accept 4s and 5s as college credit (maybe even 3s).  This means a lot:
- frequently have sophomore status as a freshman (can pick courses earlier and not get shut out)
-can graduate in 3 years (save tons of $$ or do a 4th year masters)[/quote]

UK and EU universities may use AP test scores to verify whether a U.S. applicant is the equivalent of a good UK/EU high school graduate.

Example: a lot of Dutch universities want to see four AP scores of 3 or higher. Some programs want to see three scores of 4 or higher.

Oxford and Cambridge want to see five scores of 5 or higher.

I think one consideration here is that the median middle class or rich STEM student at a T20 school, who got in mainly because of academic talent, is someone who was prepared academically to be a pretty good college freshman at the age of 12. That’s a student who feels as if taking a regular high school-level class while in high school is as painful as being locked in a dark closet. A student like that might get a low AP test score because of problems with the test development or grading process. Certainly, some high schools have terrible AP teachers, and some have non-AP classes that are better and tougher than the AP equivalents. But a middle class or rich student who really thinks that it’s a big deal to take three or four AP-level classes per year starting in junior year, simply because of the difficulty of dealing with college-level material, isn’t really on track to be a great T20 student.

Obviously, there are all sorts of potential exceptions here. A low-income student, a student from a weak school, a student with any kind of physical or mental health needs, or a student who speaks English as a second language may have to go easy on AP tests. A student at a school with rotten AP teachers might have good reason to avoid them.

Students at private school that refuse to offer AP tests might be too busy to want to self study for AP tests.

But, assuming you’re a college-educated parent with a a decent income, and you have to push your kid toward AP tests, rather than trying to encourage your kid to cut back a little in AP’s, to make room for things like art and driver’s ed, then you need to recognize that pushing your kid toward CS, premed classes or any kind of STEM majors at a T20 school is probably a bad idea. The only way a non-prodigy kid is going to do well in those kinds of programs is if the kid has a lot of drive and intellectual independence, and independently moves toward taking as many college-level classes as possible.

Maybe you can jam a so so kid into a program like that, but what’s that poorly prepared student supposed to do when confronted with problem sets designed by and for the child prodigies? You probably can’t even find tutors who can tutor regular bright kids to handle those program sets. [/quote]

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